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Originally Posted by MikeWaters
Some CES people are great. But there have been others that I have been very much less than impressed with. And I've always felt like the watered-down served-on-a-platter history that the church teaches BETRAYS the legacy of the REAL people who sacrificed for this church. Even in people that are loyal to the church, there can be SKEPTICISM and DISTRUST of the curricula, because they know the TRUTH is not the number one priority.
When I was a young teenager, my father asked me if I had been reading "The New Era." He got a little ticked at me when I said, "I'm not going to read that propaganda."
Not everything in this church needs to be recounted in the General Conference sing-song voice.
Later on in college, I was doing some work for a BYU history professor, going through a diary of an early female Utah settler. I thought to myself, now this is interesting, this is something that makes me feel connected to this pioneer heritage. It's a real person with real desires. WHY DON'T THEY ASSIGN SOMETHING LIKE THIS in all these required BYU religion classes?
Needless to say, no one asks me for my advice.
I may be a little bit of a hypocrite. When I give a lesson, I go straight from the manual. Because it only takes me 5 minutes to prepare the lesson. And that's what I'm supposed to do anyway. I'm not supposed to reinvent something or give my own personal take on whatever topic is on my mind.
Anyway, my personal opinion on why the church isn't doing well missionary-wise is because very few people are interested in it. And most of the ones who are interested are the least educated and informed people in the country. Nothing wrong with these folks, but it sure doesn't bode well when there are whole swaths of demographics you can't touch.
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In DC we are still getting top-level converts (Manager of the largest directorate in the CIA converted in 2007, she has as Harvard MPA).
Including only faith-promoting stuff is nothing new to religion (John 20:30-31). As Archaea has documented, little in the scriptures can be considered "history" in the modern sense. I don't think The Church is doing anything egregious. It's just that it won't work anymore.
I called my little sister (22, nine years my younger) in Cali last night to tell her about the peepstone, and she already knew. Now that Bushman is at Claremont they hear him speak quite often.
I don't know what we'd do without Givens and Bushman.